As noted by Healthy People 2020, many factors affect the health, function, and quality of life of older adults (www.healthypeople.gov). Economic resources are among the most influential factors. Until now, researchers have had access to a substantial amount of cross-nationally harmonized microdata on older persons' income, but cross-national microdata on household wealth (that is, assets and debt) has been virtually non-existent. The proposed project will update and extend resources made available from LIS, a cross-national data archive located in Luxembourg, with a satellite office at the Cit University of New York. LIS acquires, harmonizes, and documents microdata - i.e., data at the household- and person-level - from high- and middle- income countries. LIS' mission is to make these protected microdata available to researchers around the world. The LIS archive houses two databases. The LIS Database (launched in 1983) is focused on income data and contains 200+ datasets from nearly 50 countries; the data are used to study income inequality, poverty, employment disparities, and institutional factors shaping these outcomes. The newer LWS Database (launched in 2007) contains 20 datasets from 12 countries. The LWS data enable analyses of household wealth and debt, allowing researchers to craft a more comprehensive picture of economic wellbeing across countries. The data providers and researchers who constructed the LWS Database expected that these data would be especially crucial for assessing the economic wellbeing of the elderly. After labor market activity diminishes or ends entirely, households' (and persons') capacity to consume depends heavily on income from assets and/or on drawing down accumulated wealth. Having access to wealth data, in addition to income data, dramatically enriches analyses of economic wellbeing later in the life cycle. Not surprisingly, about half of the research based on the first (2007) release of the LWS data concerns age, aging, retirement, and/or retirement pensions. The proposed project entails preparing and launching a second release of the LWS Database. This will markedly expand, update, and refine the first release. The result will be a more standardized, more geographically diverse, more current database - containing over 50 datasets from about 26 countries. This expansion holds tremendous promise for researchers interested in aging. The larger and more diverse set of countries will enable methodological options that have not yet been feasible. The availability of data from multiple time points (within and across countries) will allow new questions to be tackled about country-level determinants of the economic wellbeing of the aged. The availability of more time points - which will increase further over time - will also allow research on trends, and will introduce the possibility to construct synthetic cohorts (which provide a window on life cycle effects). Finally, the updated LWS Database will enable researchers to begin to assess the effects of the recent global financial crisis on the economic wellbeing of the elderly, across a diverse set of countries.